Software

• Intel joins RISC-V governing body, pledges $1bn funding to chip designers

  Now that's a shot in the Arm
  Agam Shah Mon 7 Feb 2022 // 19:33 UTC 1

  Intel is establishing a $1bn fund to support early-stage and established chip companies to develop innovative chip and packaging technologies.

  The semiconductor giant is also opening its doors to companies who also need help with design and validation of advanced chips on all major architectures, including x86, Arm, and RISC-V. A goal of the fund is to advance the concept of 3D chiplet design for tighter integration of different types of processor cores.

  For example, some chip designs are combining beefy Arm CPU cores with RISC-V management CPU cores, or want to include multiple dies made using different process nodes in a single package. Intel's factories are advancing into nodes that will support tight packaging of those chips.

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• Chip supply problems might mean Wi-Fi 6E is skipped over for Wi-Fi 7, says analyst

  Lack of endpoints mean firms are ordering 6 or 7, but not 6E
  Dan Robinson Mon 7 Feb 2022 // 17:16 UTC 5

  Supply chain woes with Wi-Fi 6E products could see organisations miss on deploying network kit with the new standard and instead wait on availability of Wi-Fi 7 equipment expected next year, says Dell'Oro Group.

  Wi-Fi 6E builds on Wi-Fi 6, itself only a newish standard, by adding support for frequencies in the 6GHz portion of the spectrum. One advantage of this is that compatible devices can be steered to these frequencies, keeping the existing 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands free for other devices and reducing network contention. Cisco is one firm that has just introduced Wi-Fi 6E access points with this capability.

  But according to Dell'Oro, although manufacturers might have launched Wi-Fi 6E devices, such products are often either not available, or they are in very limited supply. There is a general shortage of semiconductor components, not just Wi-Fi semiconductors, owing to the pandemic impacting production in the countries where the chips are manufactured, and this has led device vendors to focus resources on shipping the most popular models.

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• Play Store class action has £15m budget for defeating Google in London court

  Detail emerges on who's funding it ... and for how much
  Gareth Corfield Mon 7 Feb 2022 // 15:05 UTC 9

  Google has partly won a legal bid to uncover the budget behind a not-quite-class-action lawsuit pursuing it for £920m in Britain's Competition Appeal Tribunal.

  Revealing that Elizabeth Coll's lawyers have £15.4m with which to take on the world's biggest adtech firm, judges dismissed Google's attempt to reveal how much the class-action group would have to pay those lawyers if they win.

  The decision sheds a little more light on the world of for-profit litigation in London against mostly US-based Big Tech firms.

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• Hello Slackware, our old friend: Veteran Linux distribution releases version 15.0 at last

  Nearly 6 years after previous version
  Richard Speed Mon 7 Feb 2022 // 13:48 UTC 7

  It's been a long time coming but version 15 of Slackware finally showed up at the weekend.

  Fans of the distro, which debuted in 1993, have waited since 2016's 14.2 for the full fat update. Now, nearly a year after the beta turned up, "the Slackhog emerged from its development den, did *not* see its shadow, and Slackware 15.0 has been officially released," according to Benevolent Dictator For Life Patrick Volkerding.

  The release is a big one; after all – it's been nearly six years since the previous, which came after 2013's 14.1. Version 14 goes all the way back to 2012. Hopefully the next iteration will not take quite so long, although Volkerding warned that he would be taking "a bit of a breather" after the lengthy gestation period of version 15.

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• Do you trust your provider farther than you can throw them? Cloud priorities shifting in post-COVID world – IDC

  Companies focus on 'broader' ecosystem
  Dan Robinson Mon 7 Feb 2022 // 12:59 UTC 5

  Organisations are shifting their priorities in cloud procurement as they look beyond the COVID-19 pandemic, with "trust" now apparently the biggest issue.

  These trends were identified in IDC's Q3 2021 BuyerView Cloud Pulse survey, released today, which found that almost 70 per cent of more than 1,300 respondents indicated they expect to return to pre-pandemic levels for business operations and functions within a year.

  But as well as looking to more flexible delivery models, contracts and solutions from their cloud service providers, the survey respondents said the leading attribute they are now looking for in a cloud platform is "trust".

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• UK science stuck in 'holding pattern' on EU funding by Brexit, says minister

  This may be time for plan B
  Lindsay Clark Mon 7 Feb 2022 // 11:27 UTC 95

  UK minister for science and research George Freeman has admitted that vital EU funding for research is in limbo while the nation continues to negotiate Brexit sticking points, namely Northern Ireland and fishing rights.

  Speaking to Parliament's Science and Technology Committee late last week, Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy minister George Freeman said the geopolitics of Anglo-European relations – in particular Anglo-French relations – around fishing and the Northern Ireland Protocol were complicating the decision over "association" with the European Commission's €95bn Horizon research programme.

  "I think it's pretty clear that we're in a holding pattern, with our association not being granted," he told the committee.

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• Nobara Project brings whole bunch of extensions so you can frag noobs on Fedora 35

  Brand new and a bit wobbly, but it says good things about Linux's maturity
  Liam Proven in Prague Mon 7 Feb 2022 // 10:33 UTC 8

  The Nobara Project is a fresh flavour of Fedora 35 aimed at Linux gamers and streamers. It's very new and the website is mostly just a placeholder, but it's already causing controversy.

  Windows is the default OS for PCs so PC games mostly tend to aim at Windows. If you want to run your games on Linux, that involves a bit of extra legwork. Valve Software's Steam runs on Linux (if not without some glitches early on), Proton can help with running current Windows games, and Lutris with older ones. If Proton isn't quite current enough, a developer nicknamed "Glorious Eggroll" offers Proton-GE, a cutting-edge build with the latest patches and support.

  Nobara is a new project from Glorious Eggroll, or Thomas Crider as we suspect his friends call him. He works for Red Hat, and also contributes to WINE, Lutris, and other projects. Nobara is basically Fedora 35 plus a whole bunch of extensions: the latest Proton-GE and Lutris, as you might guess, plus installers for AMD and Nvidia drivers, and the RPM Fusion repo of third-party add-ons and extensions enabled.

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• Google Cloud takes a gap year. It may come back with very different ideas

  Twelve months without refreshment can break an addiction
  Rupert Goodwins Mon 7 Feb 2022 // 09:29 UTC 9

  Opinion "We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us" is an old joke from the former Soviet Union. Many tech journalists feel the same way about earnings stories – the financial reports prepared for investors by big companies. We pretend they're important, you pretend to read them.

  They do matter but – like the results from a horserace – if you haven't bet any money on them, not very much. Perhaps they result in a small rise in profit here, perhaps a world-record company valuation collapse there (as we saw with Facebook earlier this week), but unless you've just lost the GDP of Estonia from your personal net worth (sorry about that, Mark Zuckerberg), nobody much notices.

  Sometimes, as with the latest financial results from Google/Alphabet, there are details in there that are worth a double-take. In this case, if you read closely, you'll see that Google Cloud has lessened its habitual loss by extending the operational lifespan of its cloud servers by a year, and stretching out some of its other infrastructure for longer.

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• To err is human. To really tmux things up requires an engineer

  The unbearable persistence of data
  Richard Speed Mon 7 Feb 2022 // 08:32 UTC 87

  Who, Me? A reminder to check and check again in today's Who, Me? as a Register reader learns the true meaning of persistence.

  The latest confession comes from an exotic South American city and one of the country's many ISPs. Our reader, helpfully Regomised as "Paolo", was an engineer working for the company and, as is the case for so many of us in the IT world, a wearer of multiple hats.

  Not to worry though, thanks to tmux (a terminal multiplexer) he had everything at his fingertips. Consoles for different servers, BGP and ERP settings, FTP and so on. Over his 10 or so tmux sessions he had pretty much every acronym nailed down and was god of all he surveyed.

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• Australian court finds Facebook 'divorced from reality' as it tried to define doing business down under

  This one was decided on the way the cookies crumbled
  Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor Mon 7 Feb 2022 // 07:57 UTC 15

  Australia's Federal Court has described Facebook's explanation of how its tech works as "divorced from reality" in ruling against it in a landmark privacy case.

  Facebook tech made it before the bench because in 2018 The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) sued The Social Network™ over the This Is Your Digital Life app that funnelled data to Cambridge Analytica. Just 53 Australian Facebook users installed the app, but it accessed personal information describing over 310,000 Aussie users. In March 2020 the OAIC decided that warranted action against Facebook on privacy grounds because the 310,000-plus locals did not consent to info-sharing.

  One of Facebook's defences in the case was that at the time of the data siphon it didn't do business in Australia, so was not bound by Australian privacy law.

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• New chip-stuff factories are like buses: you wafer ages then two come along at once

  GlobalWafers uses cash stashed for stalled Siltronics deal and Toshiba also promises new wafer bakery
  Laura Dobberstein Mon 7 Feb 2022 // 07:15 UTC 2

  Taiwan’s GlobalWafers has announced a cheery change of plans after its acquisition of Germany’s Siltronic fell through thanks to German authorities' failure to sign off on the deal - expansion of on existing facilities instead.

  “GlobalWafers foresees total capital expenditures of New Taiwan dollar (NTD) 100 billion (approx. USD 3.6 billion) from 2022 to 2024, including substantial greenfield investments,” the wafer-maker announced on Sunday.

  Capacity expansion for 300mm wafer and Epitaxial wafer (EPI), 200mm and 300mm Silicon on Insulator wafers (SOI), 200mm Float-Zone wafers (FZ), Silicon carbide (SiC) wafers (including SiC Epi), Gallium Nitride on Silicon wafers (GaN on Si) and other large-size next-generation products are all under consideration, across Asia, Europe and the United States.

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